[Editor's note: Zynga launched CityVille on Facebook at the beginning of the month, an ambitious move to help the company grow beyond FarmVille and other older hits. We'll examine what's making it a hit in the article below, but the larger point it seems to show is this: after a slow year for many of the larger developers, massive and fast growth is still possible on Facebook's platform.]

If CityVille were an actual city, it would now be the world’s second largest. Zynga’s newest game edged over 22 million monthly active users this morning, just eleven days after launching.

It’s often said that the days of jet-fueled app growth on Facebook are over, a common wisdom that is invalidated only by Zynga, which also saw FrontierVille rapidly grow to over 20 million players earlier this year. CityVille is far faster than FrontierVille; in June, when the latter was only 12 days old, we clocked it at 7.4 million MAU.

In fact, Zynga’s claim just a few days after launching CityVille that the game is its fastest-growing ever have proven to be quite correct.

Even when Facebook’s viral channels were vulnerable to any use developers could dream up, Zynga’s top growers like FarmVille, PetVille and FishVille only grew about half as fast as CityVille. The quickness with which Zynga was willing to crown CityVille its best-ever suggests that it had a good idea of how CityVille’s growth might unfold.

The broad strokes are pretty visible. We can see four major reasons for CityVille’s growth:

Cross-promotion

Although all game developers now engage in some form of cross-promotion, Zynga took promotion for CityVille far beyond the usual top-bar ad network. Although its efforts did start there: in Zynga’s huge, 200 million plus network, CityVille is the only Zynga game (other than the one that you’re currently playing) with an oversized button displaying its full name.

More additive to growth, there has been heavy promotion between FarmVille and CityVille. When you’re playing CityVille, it asks you to email FarmVille friends and encourage them to play; when you’re playing FarmVille, your top neighbor is now Sam, a character that pops up a link for CityVille.

> Continue reading on Inside Social Games.

Facebook appears to have rolled out its short-term test of app requests in the notifications channel to many or possibly all users. The change was designed to help developers by improving app discovery and user retention. After reviewing early feedback from gamers and testing the system ourselves, we believe many users will think the requests are redundant since they already appear elsewhere, and overrun their notifications channel, obscuring social notifications about Likes, wall posts, and photo tags.

The test was initiated on Thursday as a way to “drive discovery and engagement to applications”, according to Facebook. Notifications channel access was revoked from developers in February, and app requests began appearing in both Requests and the navigation bookmarks in November. Users had acclimated to looking for their requests in these channels, but developers wanted a more prominent way to lead users to their apps.

Early feedback on the test from a small but vocal minority of the user base has criticized the mismatch in volume of different types of requests in the same channel. Notifications were previously a quieter channel for users to learn when friends publicly interacted with their content, but some users with many friends who play games receive dozens of app requests a day. These quickly push the traditional social notifications out of the five slots in the notifications drop-down, forcing users to click through to their full page notifications screen. Low-urgency app request notifications may be viewed as spam when mixed with high-relevance social notifications.

Other users cite how receiving a notification used to be exciting because it meant someone Liked their photo, commented on their post, tagged them in a status update, or engaged with them in some other meaningful way. Being distracted only to find someone selfishly wanted their help in a game dilutes this joy and can make checking notifications a chore. A separate app notification icon in the top navigation bar could be a better solution.

While its common for Facebook users to react to any interface change, and few who prefer changes are moved enough to comment, the complaints seem unanimously negative and somewhat logical. Facebook’s internal tests of interface changes aren’t always a good measure, as employees or designated testers may subscribe to different etiquette norms and be less likely to abuse features than the average user.

For instance, some users might see the change as an opportunity to bombard friends with high visibility requests for their own gain. Facebook’s testers may have been more cautious about sending requests, leading the company to think app request notifications would be helpful, not spammy.

Facebook says its seeking to “capture the network effects of the update”. Despite the early backlash from a few users, the test may be successfully improving app discovery and engagement to the benefit of developers. However, if app request notifications realign the Facebook experience too squarely around games, users may find it more difficult to stay touch with the most sustainable driver of engagement — their friends.

A handful of apps show massive gains on this week’s AppData list of fastest-growing Facebook apps by monthly active users, while most others are closer to normal levels, although still a bit high. There are two broad trends driving this growth: the impending arrival of Christmas and New Year’s, and Zynga’s release of CityVille.

As we cover in detail over on Inside Social Games this morning, CityVille is already a huge phenomenon, with 22 million MAU. Unfortunately, Facebook’s reporting is running a day or two behind, as occasionally happens.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	CityVille	12,941,177	+12,276,238	+1,846%
2.	My Year In Status	7,096,530	+6,730,783	+1,840%
3.	Birthday Calendar	2,880,258	+1,438,348	+100%
4.	JibJab	4,147,916	+987,362	+31%
5.	Badoo	5,133,138	+935,594	+22%
6.	FarmVille	54,528,558	+933,544	+2%
7.	Yahoo!	6,858,572	+751,360	+12%
8.	FrontierVille	30,393,785	+678,369	+2%
9.	Phrases (new)	17,329,628	+671,776	+4%
10.	Social Fun	6,812,417	+614,560	+10%
11.	City of Wonder	7,520,929	+576,514	+8%
12.	phrases 4 fun	3,474,364	+572,434	+20%
13.	My Top Fans Pro	1,494,776	+560,064	+60%
14.	Die Herausforderung der Städte	534,608	+526,662	+6,628%
15.	Mighty Pirates	1,441,254	+516,089	+56%
16.	Game of Truth	2,360,184	+471,422	+25%
17.	Ravenwood Fair	4,933,184	+464,738	+10%
18.	Vegas City	3,936,761	+437,770	+13%
19.	Frases Diarias	10,441,640	+435,785	+4%
20.	德州撲克(中文版)	4,030,139	+422,730	+12%

Taking on CityVille first, the game is succeeding from a combination of international growth and heavy cross promotion. We broke down the details in depth earlier this morning. The game is pushing some growth across Zynga’s portfolio, with both FarmVille and FrontierVille growing significantly. Long-term, CityVille could detract from other Zynga games.

My Year In Status is taking advantage of the end of the year, when most people start thinking back to what they’ve accomplished during the year. The app also saw huge growth last year around December, then lay dormant for most of 2010. Likewise, JibJab and even the dating app Badoo could be enjoying some effects from the season.

The other app worth pointing out is Yahoo!. Between Yahoo and Microsoft’s apps, which show when Facebook users visit their web properties, Facebook’s traffic-tracking system is beginning to surface some of the web’s connections, which could be interesting for future analysis.

Check out the top headlines and insights this week from Inside Social Games – tracking all the latest developments at the intersection of games and social platforms.

Monday, December 6th, 2010

• Square Enix Gifts Facebook Players With Its Iconic Bird in Chocobo’s Crystal Tower
• Old and New Games Mix on This Week’s List of Fastest Facebook Gainers by MAU
• TeamLava Expands its iDevice Story Franchise Once Again

Tuesday, December 7th, 2010

• MySpace Gets Its Own Applifier-Style Bar With Game-Promo
• Take Your City To War with Urban Warfare on Facebook
• Google’s Chrome Web Store Puts Social and Casual Games Side-By-Side
• Another Great City-Builder Comes to Facebook With Big Business

Wednesday, December 8th, 2010

• Zynga Apps Take Over This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Games by DAU
• Through Facebook, Clash of Kingdoms Grows
• Highlights This Week from the Inside Network Job Board: Ubisoft, Storm8, & More
• MindJolt Partners With BIM to Publish Casual Games
• Facebook CTO Bret Taylor to Discuss Facebook’s 2011 Platform Priorities at Inside Social Apps

Thursday, December 9th, 2010

• EA Puts Pogo, Its Casual Game Portal, on iOS
• Holiday Village Brings Socially-Created Dioramas to Facebook
• Gaia Online Goes to Facebook With Monster Galaxy, a Pokemon-Style RPG
• New Hires in Social Gaming: CrowdStar, Empire Avenue, Kabam, & More

Friday, December 10th, 2010

• Set Sail for Ngmoco’s Adventure Bay on iPad & iPhone
• Casual Titles Takes Over This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Games
• Social Game Monetization: New Channels to Show You the Money
• Social Gaming Roundup: Acquisitions, Digital Chocolate, Mixi, & More
• Google’s Eric Chu to Discuss Android’s 2011 Social Platform Plans at Inside Social Apps

The Inside Network Job Board is dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities in the Facebook Platform and social gaming ecosystem.

Here are this week’s highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at Ubisoft, Storm8, Playfish, Kabam, and
Playdom.

• Lead Artist (San Francisco, CA)
• Producer (San Francisco, CA)

• Users Relations Associate (Redwood City, CA)

• Head of Acquisition Marketing (Redwood City, CA)

• Senior Product Manager, Payments & Monetization (Redwood City, CA)
• Business Intelligence Quantitative Analyst (Redwood City, CA)

• Social Game Design Lead (San Francisco, CA)
• Art Director (Mountain View, CA)
  
• Senior Game Designer (Mountain View, CA)

Listings on the Inside Network Job Board are distributed to readers of Inside Facebook and Inside Social Games through regular posts and widgets on the sites. That way, you can be sure that your open positions are being seen by the leading developers, product managers, marketers, designers, and executives in the Facebook Platform and social gaming industry today.

January 25th | San Francisco

As we announced recently, Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011, our second conference on the future of monetization on social platforms, is happening January 25th in San Francisco.

Today we are excited to announce that Google’s Eric Chu, Group Manager of Android, will be joining us for a fireside chat on Android’s 2011 social roadmap at Inside Social Apps. Social mobile applications, especially games monetizing through virtual goods, have seen rapid growth over the last year. Now that there are over 300,000 Android phones activated each day, developers are increasingly investing in building applications for the Android ecosystem.

With the rise of Facebook and third party mobile social platforms, what will Android’s approach to supporting social application developers in 2011? How should developers think about what to expect from Google in the year ahead? We’ll discuss Android’s 2011 social platform plans in-depth at Inside Social Apps .

Who’s Speaking?

At Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011, executives and experts from Facebook, Google, leading social networks, mobile platforms, social game and app developers, media companies, virtual goods and payment services, and investors will be discussing the future of social platforms and virtual goods monetization in social games and apps.

We’re honored to present the following confirmed speakers at Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011:

	Bret Taylor CTO, Facebook		Eric Chu Group Manager, Android Platform, Google
	Kevin Chou Co-founder and CEO, Kabam		Vish Makhijani SVP Business Operations, Zynga
	Rick Thompson Co-Founder, Playdom (now part of Disney), and Investor		Peter Relan Executive Chairman, CrowdStar
	Rex Ng Co-Founder and CEO, 6waves		Deborah Liu Commerce Product Marketing, Facebook
	Sean Ryan EVP and GM Games, News Corp		Bill Gossman CEO, hi5
	Anil Dharni Co-founder, Funzio; Founder, Storm8		Jason Oberfest VP Social Apps, ngmoco:) (now part of DeNA)
	Jens Begemann Co-founder and CEO, Wooga		Eric Goldberg Managing Director, Crossover Technologies
	Carey Kolaja Senior Director, Digital Goods Operations, PayPal		Raph Koster VP Creative Design, Playdom (now part of Disney)
	Atul Bagga VP Equity Research, Games, ThinkEquity		Manu Rekhi GM Games and Platform, MySpace
	Matthaeus Krzykowski Founder, Xyologic		Eric Eldon Editor, Inside Network
	Justin Smith Founder, Inside Network

Key topics for the day will include:

• Growth and User Aquisition on the Facebook Platform
• New and Alternative Social Platforms: Where Do Opportunities Lie?
• Growth and Monetization on Mobile Social Platforms
• M&A Landscape for Small & Midsize Developers
• Monetization on Facebook in a Credits World

Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 – January 25th in San Francisco

Social applications first emerged in 2007, and are today maturing into a global media ecosystem. With the launch of the Facebook Platform, followed by platforms from MySpace and other social networks, developers worldwide could leverage the social graph to create new kinds of social experiences never before possible.

Now, three and a half years later, what started out as sheep throwing and vampire biting has quickly become a profitable billion-dollar industry, punctuated by numerous major acquisitions by the world’s leading media companies and developers. But now, new challenges are emerging, affecting big players and new entrants alike.

Inside Social Apps will investigate the latest trends and challenges for social applications, and look at what’s to come for developers throughout the space – including the growth of virtual goods and social applications on mobile devices.

What are the biggest uncertainties and opportunities facing the future of social games and applications in 2011, and who is leading the way?

Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 takes place January 25th, 2011 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, and brings together the world’s leading entrepreneurs to weigh in on the future of social app and game monetization.

Inside Social Apps will be a one-day summit led by Inside Network’s Eric Eldon and Justin Smith, and will take in-depth investigative approach to the day’s discussions. At Inside Social Apps, Inside Network will work alongside founders and executives of the top social networking, social gaming, mobile social gaming, payments, and virtual goods infrastructure companies to analyze the most important issues affecting the industry. Inside Social Apps is geared towards developers on Facebook, iPhone, Android, and emerging online social platforms.

Inside Social Apps will be a content-rich day of critical discussion, followed by an evening and nighttime of casual networking.

Register Now

A limited set of “Early Admission” tickets is available through Friday, December 17 at a special price of $299. This price will change after Friday, and space will be very limited, so we encourage you to register now.

From all of us at Inside Network, we hope to see you on January 25th in San Francisco at Inside Social Apps!

Congress Censors Privacy Hearing – In a strange incident, Ohio Democrat Rep. Zachary Space asked Columbia University Law School Professor Eben Moglen to censor his remarks during a hearing on online privacy to avoid specific criticism of Facebook. The hearing was for the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection, more here.

Facebook Shutters Community Council - We previously wrote about Facebook’s attempt at crowd-sourced content moderation, the Facebook Community Council. This week, Andrea James, who was one of the Council members, said an email shut down the group without much explanation. James supposed it was because the company bettered its moderation algorithms.

Facebook Tries New Email Importer Tactic – Facebook seems to be testing a new feature to access users’ email accounts by asking for the password. This helps Facebook add new users.

Disney Reaches 100M Likes – Disney announced this week in a press release that the company, across its Facebook Page properties, had reached 100 million Likes, or fans.

Mobile Analytics Company Flurry Raises $15M – San Francisco-based Flurry raised $15 million in the third round this week, bringing its total amount raised to over $29 million. The company runs analytics on iPhone and Android apps.

Facebook’s Safety Advisory Board Grows – The National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV) recently joined Facebook’s Safety Advisory Board and is now one of five organizations to partner with the social network in North America and Europe on related issues.

Humorous Insight Into Latest Facebook Lawsuit - AllThingsD reported this week that the latest fracas involving the Winklevoss twins, who sued Mark Zuckerberg for stealing their idea for Facebook, takes a lighter approach in some of the language.

Russian Facebook Investor DST, $500M In – Digital Sky Technologies, a Russian investment fund, recently disclosed that the company had invested a total of $500 million in Facebook to date.

South Korea Balks at Facebook Privacy – South Korea’s Communications Commission has asked Facebook to improve its privacy protections there. Specifically, that Facebook needs to notify users of the purpose of sharing information when it’s offered to a third party.

Facebook’s Visual Global Dominance – Vincenzo Cosenza posted a most recent visual of Facebook’s global reach.

Zuckerberg To Donate Large Portion of His Fortune - Facebook co-founders Dustin Moskovitz and Mark Zuckerberg are among 17 other extremely wealthy individuals who have agreed to join the Giving Pledge. The Pledge is an effort pushed by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to encourage wealthy people in the U.S. to donate their fortune when they die.

Facebook to Reimburse Gay Employees – Facebook is set to reimburse its gay employees for taxes related to health care costs. Because same-sex marriages are not recognized by the federal government, employees who cover their spouses with their company health insurance must pay more; Facebook is set to reimburse this amount to its employees.

Facebook has updated its official statistics page with new numbers that show how it has become much more than a social networking web site.

While the on-site platform appears to be entering a new phase of slower growth and more monetization, the social plugins and Graph API that Facebook launched earlier this year are giving it wider reach than ever before.

First, the on-site platform. Users are now installing 20 million applications per day. This appears to be a new stat so it’s not clear if it’s higher or lower than previous months. Considering that Facebook says it has more than 500 million users, that’s 4% of the user base installing an app every day. The percentage may be slightly lower, though, as Facebook’s ad tool shows it having 573 million monthly active users as of December 1st, and comScore shows it having even more.

Two stats were also removed in this update, reducing the clarity of what’s going on: “Every month, more than 70% of Facebook users engage with Platform applications,” and “More than 550,000 active applications currently on Facebook Platform.”

Overall, the developer community continues to stretch across the globe, with 190 countries represented on the platform today versus 180 when the last stats update happened in October. The number of developers — one million — is unchanged.

Moving beyond the application platform, Facebook continues to expand to the web. It now has more than 250 million users engaging with its external products, including Connect, the Like button and other “social plugins.” That’s up from 150 million in late June, and 60 million in February — the launch of plugins and the Graph API in late April has clearly helped Facebook make itself a more central part of how people use the web. Since the new products, Facebook also says that its getting 10,000 more web sites integrating with it per day; around 2 million are using the social plugins, from 1 million in June.

And this number isn’t just showing smaller. Facebook continues to get more of the largest on the web. In October, it said it had two-thirds of comScore’s list of the 100 largest web sites on board. Now it says it has more than 80. Worldwide, it has gone from getting half of the largest sites to “over half.”

Stacking these numbers against the total user base, Facebook is getting big portions engaging with it across the web. For another example of how it’s doing off-site, it also recently said that it has more than 200 million people interacting with its products on mobile devices.

Conclusion

Another data point is developer traffic on the platform — many of the largest social games and other applications have had big drops in MAU counts in the past year as Facebook has altered features and policies. At the same time, we’ve seen evidence of many smaller developers prospering. Given the information available, the platform is clearly entering a slower-growing, mature stage, where the focus has become more on making money and less on growth.

Connect has been around for years, but Facebook’s renewed efforts to build on it with the plugins and Graph API has quickly paid off. With its big and growing portions of off-site users, Facebook has the opportunity to integrate even more of its features, like Credits and ads, with everywhere users are.

Facebook has announced updates to several planned migrations and support for video and audio Open Graph tags in its weekly Platform update to the Developer Blog. Also, as of today, the November 2010 Rollup, POST for Canvas, and JSON Encoding Empty Arrays migrations are enabled by default for new application, and all apps will be required to migrate on March 10, 2011.

OAuth 2.0 for Canvas

To ensure users don’t “trick [an] application into thinking they are someone else”,  when the app calls for the user’s ID, Facebook developed Canvas Authentication OAuth 2.0. It uses a signed_request with an application’s secret which is only known to the developer and Facebook, preventing third parties from altering the signature without invalidating the request. This more secure format helps protect users and developers.

OAuth 2.0 for Canvas is leaving beta without changes, but the migration won’t be forced on developers using fb_sig “for the forseeable future”. However, Facebook recommends migrating to signed_request, as those who don’t won’t receive new features, and fb_sig use will no longer appear in documentation. The old “Canvas Session Parameter” will be removed on March 10, 2011, so those who’ve enabled it should move to OAuth 2.0 for Canvas before then.

Open Graph Tags for Video and Audio

At f8, Facebook began allowing developers to define Open Graph object meta tags to denote an object’s type. This markup helps Facebook properly direct actions taken to an object, such as placing the Like of an object tagged “movie” in the Movies category of a user’s interests. In a Platform update last month, Facebook began allowing objects with less than 10,000 Likes to change their type tag without resetting their Likes.

Now, Facebook is supporting new tag types for audio and video content. Audio or video files on an Open Graph-enabled site tagged og:video or og:audio will be displayed on the full news feed story published if a user Likes with comment the hosting Open Graph page. These rich media feed stories are larger and much more compelling, driving additional Likes to the original Open Graph page. It’s therefore advised that if an Open Graph page hosts a representative video or audio file, it should be be tagged with og:video or og:audio to take advantage of this increased exposure.

App Requests in the Notifications Channel

Also included in the blog post is a mention of the test of application requests and invites in the notifications channel which we covered yesterday. If rolled out, the notifications channel could significantly aid app discovery and retention.

Two companies, Cardpool and Plastic Jungle, are competing to become the preferred way to exchange unwanted gift card for Facebook Credits. This week, both unveiled new functionality that allows users to enter a gift card’s code and have the Credits deposited in their account that same day. There is currently $30 billion in unused American gift cards waiting to be exchanged, according to literature cited by both companies, creating high stakes for this battle.

Here we’ll look at what differentiates Cardpool and Plastic Jungle, discuss how each could gain an advantage, and declare a current front runner.

Background and Similarities

Plastic Jungle was founded in 2006 and has since raised $23.4 million in funding from Shasta Ventures, First Round Captal, Bay Partners, and others. It operates a website where users can exchange gift cards for cash, PayPal funds, or Amazon gift cards, and a separate Facebook application allowing exchanges for Credits. The younger Cardpool, founded in 2009, has only raised a relatively small undisclosed seed round of funding, but that backing comes from respected super angels including Ron Conway, Jeff Fluhr of StubHub, Max Levchin of Slide and PayPal, and startup incubator YCombinator. Its website allows users to exchange cards for cash, Amazon gift cards, or Facebook Credits.

Many policies and procedures of the two companies are identical. Both offer users up to 92% of the value of their sold cards, allow cards to be purchased at up to a 30% discount, and guarantee any cards bought from them. If users want cash back for their cards, both offer free shipping and estimate the turn around time for receiving a check at two weeks. The list of merchants whose cards can be exchanged for Credits through either service is almost identical, including airlines, hotel chains, and big box retailers such as Best Buy, Target, and Walmart.

Differentiators and Opportunities

Plastic Jungle’s primary advantage is its self-contained Facebook app, allowing users to acquire Credits in the same place they’ll use them. Cardpool technically has an application, but it simply directs to its website. Plastic Jungle’s other differentiators include card value and discount percentage filtering options for finding gift cards to purchase, and the display of “Hot Card Deals” on its home page. The option to exchange for Facebook Credits on the Plastic Jungle website would be a useful addition. Kristin Donelson, the company’s VP of Marketing, says it’s looking to let users convert cards into value on other platforms. When asked about possible integration with the new Google Chrome Web Store, she replied, “you never know.”

Cardpool offers a slightly larger list of merchants whose cards can be converted into Credits. Merchants not offered by Plastic Jungle include the Apple Store, Macy’s, Urban Outfitters, and Ticketmaster. Cardpool offers a referral program where users can make $10 when a friend who uses their referral link makes a purchase. Funder Anson Tsai says Cardpool looks up to Zappos, inspiring it to offer a 100-day return policy on purchased cards, and to refuse to sell gift cards which expire or whose value deteriorates to avoid disappointing customers.

Cardpool also provides sharing buttons connected to Facebook and Twitter and an email contact importer for inviting friends. These viral mechanisms offer significant potential for growth. When we spoke with Plastic Jungle in October, CEO Bruce Bower said it was considering how to implement social features, but none have appeared yet. Users are typically eager to tell friends about ways to save money, so Plastic Jungle needs to add sharing functionality soon or it risks being outpaced by Cardpool.

Neither company allow redemption of popular gift cards for the iTunes store or Starbucks. The first to secure deals with these companies could make gains during the holiday season. To reduce sign up friction and allow for the easy transfer of Credits, both should add Facebook Connect as a registration option. Direct tie ins or becoming a payment method for social games could expose the companies to users who need Facebook Credits.

Cardpool Atop a High-Potential Industry

Currently, Cardpool is the better gift card for Facebook Credits exchange, thanks to its sharing features, customer service policies, and larger merchant list. However, with such a large market and so little penetration, there’s room for more than one company to succeed. Cardpool’s Tsai believes “the biggest issue is awareness. Most people don’t know any of us exist. If people knew about these sites, they’d be using them.”